polarized double

This image has already been screened on the Web, but only in paltry low-rez. I was on a site that only allowed images of 1000 pixels wide, which was never satisfactory, especially for showing off polished work with hyper-detail. Here at least, I can add in images that have at least three times as much pixel-power, which is great for getting a decent butchers at all artwork, even the rough sketches. THE FLY archives consist of a dozen or so rough sketches, which will be added on here over time: this one is sort of 'half-polished', it being a fairly quick experimental work. Doom Laden and Despondent, what was I thinking of? I also got banned from a cartoon site the same day I showed this on their boards; so a real controversial entry.

As if I haven't got enough on my plate drawing-wise [ I have a huge pile of black-and-white line drawings, which is boosted daily, all waiting to be colored in] I am kick-starting  yet another sub-theme, centered around that well-known chap who instigated the Bloodbath Known as World War Two. I usually steer clear of doing caricatures of well-known people, mostly because I can only 'do' certain people, and also I never keep up with curent media trends [I no longer own a TV set] so I am really out of touch with who is meant to be 'famous' nowadays, but  surely most everyone is familiar with the evil phenomenon that was Adolph Hitler, so surely I can't go wrong drawing him, in terms of reconizability. This cartoon was part of a larger composite that still remains unfinished, and has already been seen on the Wonderweb [ or should that be 'Wunderweb'?] but hopefully this image will be 'new' for most readers [it dates from last Fall]. I had intended t

At first glance, this looks like a prrreettttyyyy unremarkable posting, but do stay put: this one is well worth including, as it ably and lucidly illustrates the sheer 'hit-and-miss' nature of the World of Paid Cartooning---a profession as precarious as any, save for the even more unstable field of professional acting. Sometimes I enter cartoon competitions on various art-agency sites: I have won a few of them, and quite remarkably, I have been paid more than once by submitting pencil roughs only, which quite literally takes me a minute or two of my time------and to be quite honest, this early penciling stage is, for me anyway, the most enjoyable part of creating cartoons-----you are never sure exactly what you will quite come up with, it is all part of the inventive fun. Anyway, here is another 'toon from last year [2014, at the time of writing, all you readers of the far future] that yielded me 200 Australian Dollars------I am quite sure that this example represents the q

OK, I have almost got through the backlog of previously unseen experimental roughs done over the Festive Period: here is yet another captionless Medievel Offering, with a fetching buxom wench rejecting her unsuitable suitor in a way that she deems......... suitable. I have at least one prrreeetttyyy macabre Medievel toon coming up shortly: it's highly visual,, as per usual.  Gadzooks!   I am getting the hang of these Medievel gags, odd bodkins; they offer great scope and opportunity for a verily good groat's worth of Mirth and Mayhem...... The high-rez scanning has picked up impurities like the ink on the other side of the recycled paper bleeding through------these were just experimental roughs, remember....no more, no less. Plate 1:    the finished slapstick gag, after Digital tweaking Plate 2:   the rough in it's original state, in dire need of spacing out Plate 3: Rough Medievel sketches done in Jan 2015 coming up:  first Baby Boomer tattoo design/ brand 'new' co

2014 was the year I exported a fair amount of paid cartoonery to Australia and the USA especially. For all the modern frustrations that the interweb can throw up at us, there is no denying that it is extremely handy for establishing contact between artists looking for paid work, and those willing to pay for cartoon designs. Every day, new assignments come in, and I often browse thru these looking for something alligned to my own individual stylee; if you strike 'gold' ,  and a potential buyer connects with your way of drawing, you can pick up work straight away---other times, payees are very nit-picking, and it can be  quite  a drag before any official work transpires---human nature being as fickle as it is,  this is to be expected now and again. Anyhoo, here is what the best-dressed plumbers in Beverley Hills, California, were attired in, T-shirt design-wise,  in Summer 1914....... sorry, add 100 years to that last numero. Plate 1:   the finished artwork I sold to the American

During the long, harsh winter of 2014/15, I coccooned myself from the biting cold by submerging myself in a spurt of hyper-activity, cranking out a whole bunch of raw-but-vital cartoon roughs, most of them just churned out in a few minutes apiece. Needless to say, the quality control on these drawings was pretty variable, but it was using this stream-of-conciousness, very spontaneous approach that yielded me THE FLY , a concept in itself    which  will keep me quite busy for a long time to come. I have now quit doing these quick sketches as I am spending  most of my cartooning time on more time-consuming polished works, however I have decided to show the few remaining unseen ruffs I did during this intensively creative period, which is where this potholing/explorer gag idea sprung from....a knowledge of basic UK musical trends of the 70s will not go ammiss for this one, for those who prefer a coherent punchline in their cartoons. These ruffs were intended to be seen on a forum I used t

Last winter, I had an intensely creative time when I belted out non-stop quick rough cartoon sketches, and very enjoyable it was too------I never realized I had done quite so many until I went back to look through them recently. Originally done for inclusion on a public forum, I still have a few of these unseen examples which I aim to upload/dump [depending on your point of view] onto here over the next few days. Considering the sheer speed I knocked these out: ---just a few minutes each----they stand up fairly OK, there is a lot of vitality in these ruffs, which almost always gets lost during the later 'cleanup' period. I have added a wee bit of color, and resized a couple of elements for clarity purposes, but I am deliberately keeping these fairly rough-looking, as that is all they were ever intended to be. A couple more of these on the way, and these have certainly never been seen anywhere before. I have stopped doing these quick roughs for the meantime.......I am in the mid

Looking back thru the very early POLARIZED OPINIONS blog entries, I was faintly aghast to discover that a fair few of the older images have shrunken down in size  considerably : the early works were never especially large to begin with, but seen now, some of them are painfully microscopic in resolution, and I am fairly certain they have been compressed by the image hosting responsible----the self-same thing has happened to my cartoon images on phaze-buke. I aim to keep this Boomer Blog in tip-top condition,and I fully intend rescanning the original inkings, and re-inserting them where the imagery can be seen in luvvie-duvvie  'bigscreen' splendor. I am just grateful I never relied totally on digital imagery for archive purposes, or all I would have been left with would be tiny, lacking-in-detail versions of the original cartoons. I have heard of people destroying their family photos after scanning the entire archive: now, in light of my recent discoveries, I am not so sure that

This image has already appeared within this bloggular service, although seen within this isolated context, it may not be immediately obvious. My approach to cartooning has taken dramatic new directions this last few months, with the introduction of composites, especially; meaning I have much more freedom to produce 'nicer' artwork using 'new' methods in which I have the luxury of having much more space to draw in..... [up until fairly recently, I drew EVERYTHING at the same old A4 scale, and although results are often  fine this way, it can sometimes be pretty limiting; more on this later]. Here's a decent example here: this satire on Baby Boomer as Alex out of A Clockwork Orange was drawn using very large imagery; the head/face section itself was almost A4 sized, with the remainder of the body also hewn large,  and all this is composited and shrunk down in unison  later on, a bit like Terry Gilliam used to do, in his celebrated Monty Pythons' Flying Circus cut-

Time to reveal the murkiest, seedy underbelly of my cartooning activities:  I occassionally dabble into the  Twilight World of Tattoo Design, selling images fairly regularly; it's very easy work that can pay fairly decently. I do not ink direct onto human skin, and do not desire doing so .......... I do the customized dee-zines for the tattooists,  only. I started off doing this upon very dodgy ground indeed---------I met a tattooist who was great at traditional designs, but could not draw original cartoons for toffee------enter my smudgy inkings, and I managed to flog some variations of a very well-known comic-strip Scottish family, as well as a connected spikey-haired Scottish urchin. I know for a fact that there are a fair few Scots walking around the Edinburgh area and beyond, sporting my silly cartoon designs; I have yet to actually meet any of these folks in the bars I visit, but rest assured, I would recognize my own drawings in a trice, and would gleefully point out this co

THE FLY started life as a dozen or so rough sketches, churned out quickly, using  only an old  4H pencil, ballpoint pen and recycled A4 paper. The first ten or so ruffs have already been seen in public, however there are three unseen [until now] images done over Dec 2014/ Jan 15 that  I want to archive here.......I thought they were just as valid as the others at the time, and were left out of the public arena for all sort of other reasons, but here they be noo, anyhoo....... I cleaned these up slightly, adding some nominal color, leaving the basic 'roughness' of these sketches in, as I feel they contain a lot of pretty cool spontanaeity [ or summat ]..... THE FLY has now graduated to the full-color concept drawing stage, and quite a few of these are in preperation as we squeak. The next flyworks are more nicely rendered ; however these early sketches illustrated here  were paramount [ or should that be 20th Century Fox ?] in laying the spadework for this concept, and that is w

When I was on a well-known cartoon specialist site, I embarked upon a new theme of putting together a concept based on Medievel times and characters, and this here entry is my first-ever polished cartoon along these lines....... There is still a long, long way to go on this one, in fact, I still lack a central character to tie the imagery and events together: I have some ideas though, and test character Model Sheets will duly follow. The two folks here are the Torturer Couple, who inhabit the strip on a strictly secondary, or 'supporting characters' basis. This image was made up of two seperate images, with the characters drawn seperately then overlaid the background layout---fascinating, eh!? [ yawn] Much more of this sort of material exists in the can, so keep 'em, peeled, viewers.

I have to make space on my hard-drive, so here is a good opportunity to add these Mascot Designs I sold to an Australian football club last year. These jobs are  very fortunate, and pay much better than, say, doing UK comic strips for the kids' market. You have to create original-looking characters and hand over the copyright, but that is no big deal. Includes one example of redesigned ball, required by the customer. Enjoi!!

I was on the CCGB forum for just over 6 years. A lot of these very specialist sites do not really get a lot of people looking in, other than other cartoonists and enthusiasts---many of the threads only get 200 odd hits or so, there is also the limitation on there  of only being able to put on cartoon images that are only 1000 pixels wide: on here, I can  easily add new images with three times as much resolution, which is much more desirable, and just as easy. It is a sad fact of life that trivial junk like 85 per cent of facebook gets the mass  viewer attention---this mindless minutae seems to be what the public really wants, going by ratings figures----and genuinely specialist sites like the CCGB forum  are largely unknown by the wider  public at large, but there you have it.   These sites occupy just their own tiny oasis within the vast internet world: if you stop visiting them, they simply dissolve into nothingness on your own personal radar, they do not spill out into the wider wor

culled from my personal parchment archives:  one of the large series of quicko roughs I belted out in the USA during Dec 2014-Jan 15,  originally intended for viewing on  a forum but now destined to be unearthed here instead.

Read the comments added below for an insight into my disastrous time at a well-known cartoon forum.

TECHNICOLOR 'FLY' : first appearence on this blog Athough the BABY BOOMER characters are still ongoing and 'active', I am diversifying into different themes, and I have long been looking for a 'hard' science-fiction property, which does not really fit into the BABY BOOMER concept...... I discovered a sci-fi theme around 3 months ago, and here it is: a satirical spin on the 1958 20th Century Fox lurid schlocker THE FLY....  actually, in my view, it is a very effective surrealist nightmare, with at least two unforgettable scenes---you will know the ones I mean if you have also seen this film. I belted out about ten rough sketches first [posted on the good old CCGB, no less] and here is the first polished effort, the St Valentines' Day Special: the second illustration features the two characters before the background underlay was added